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Despite a slew of government schemes aimed to promote menstrual hygiene among women and adolescent girls, use of sanitary napkins is still sparse in large swathes of India, various studies show. The Menstrual Hygiene Scheme (MHS) to provide subsidized sanitary napkins was launched by the health ministry in 2011. It was aimed to reach 15...

Sustainability now needs to shift the paradigm from conservation to rejuvenation. The conversation must evolve from the scare of scarcity to the pursuit of plenty, albeit in an alternative form. The Oxford dictionary defines rejuvenation as restoring to a condition characteristic of a younger landscape while conservation is defined as prevention of wasteful use of...

Sharmaji ka beta is dwelling upon different methods to quit smoking. He is trying to figure out ways which can bring self realization and determination to quit, among his smoker friends. Sharma started monitoring the government efforts regarding smoking. He wondered if the efforts were actually enough. Sharma realized, government has taken up the no smoking...

In India, cancer has become one of the four leading causes of death. According to estimates from the Cancer Registry Program of ICMR, Delhi has the highest prevalence rate in India – there are currently 200,000 people in the capital with cancer with about 21,000 being added annually.  Of these, 10,000 die every year....

Sharmaji ka beta had heard many reasons as to why people smoked or started smoking. He also came across a weird perception that people had about smokers. A colleague told him, smoking allowed him to have an easy break at work whenever he wanted. He said, if he would take a break and use...

Punjab Finance Minister Manpreet Singh Badal on Monday called upon industrial houses to spend on education, health and other sectors under their corporate social responsibility programs for uplifting the social and economic conditions of the people in the state. Badal made the appeal after inaugurating a new building at a government primary school here. The building has...

The High-level Regional Conference on Information Management for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Resilience opened with a strong focus on regional cooperation for combating sand and dust storms in Asia and the Pacific. Sand and dust storms, along with drought, land degradation, desertification and wind erosion, present a formidable challenge to sustainable development. Approximately 2 trillion tons of...

India has about 10 million leprosy affected people, who need daily care and support but do not receive them. Even the laws cannot help them in spite of them being good citizens of this country. There are about 7000 leprosy colonies in India where affected people have made their own settlements due to the social stigma around their disease. According...

Sharmaji ka beta is a sensible person. He knows that smoking is not good for health. So he never did. However, lot of his friends and colleagues did. Everyday in office, his seniors and colleagues would go out for a smoke while Sharma would sit inside the office waiting for them to come back. Over...

While large organisations clearly understand the importance of creating and driving a focus on sustainability, many of them still fall asleep at the wheel. Addressing and driving sustainability is, today, an accepted focus area for most businesses, but while a few progressive corporations take sustainability seriously, many still don’t get it. It is not only...

A couple of years ago, The Prime Minister Narendra Modi emphasised the need for adequate sanitation in India is his Republic Day speech. The then Union rural development minister, Jairam Ramesh said that India is one of the filthiest countries in the world. After spending Rs 19,626 crore in last 10 years on Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), a large population of India...

According to the World Development Journal, economic growth for a developing country solves not only the issues of financial resources availability but also contributes towards improving living standards as a higher gross national product. India, as reported by World Bank in 2013, had a per capita income of US$1164 and ranked 112th out of 164...